Anthony Horowitz's 'Foyle's War' as Jewish Propaganda

Who doesn't like a good old-fashioned whodunnit?

I must confess that as part of my one day off a week (usually Sunday) I tend to spend the afternoon doing nothing more strenuous than sitting in a comfortable chair watching whodunnits among other things. It helps to relax and blank the mind, but more fundamentally it allows me to catch up with the sort of popular culture that I deliberately detach myself from six days a week.

One whodunnit series of which I have long been a fan is 'Foyle's War' which is simply a series of murder-mysteries which are set in southern England during and after the Second World War. The star of the show is Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle - played by Michael Kitchen - and his dual Watsonian sidekicks Detective Sergeant Paul Milner (played by Anthony Howell) and Sam Stewart (played by Honeysuckle Weeks).

Now the interesting thing about 'Foyle's War' is that it - being set during the Second World War - frequently deals with the issue of jews and as such provides a point of obvious interest to us. This interest in jews I suspect in large part because the creator Anthony Horowitz is himself a jew. The reason for this is very simple: many groups - such as homosexuals, leftists, Jehovah's Witnesses and gypsies - were targeted by the Third Reich for prosecution and/or internment, but yet we rarely meet mentions of other prosecution other than that of jews in 'Foyle's War'.

It is this completely out of historical context focus on jews that is displayed in Horowitz's 'Foyle's War' that I wish to highlight. To begin with I should further note that in other bits of Horowitz's work - such as the Poirot episode 'Sad Cypress' - we find personifications of his attitude that the Third Reich is the embodiment of evil (which is not found in the original Agatha Christie story) and further in the episode 'The Clocks' we find Poirot (played by the jewish actor David Suchet) getting on his high horse about the irrational nature of anybody - be they British or German - who dared to believe in the Third Reich.

Getting back to 'Foyle's War': we come across our first episode dealing with the jews in the second episode of the first season ('The White Feather'). The main focus is placed on the activities of a man named Guy Spencer and his 'fascist sympathisers' (the 'Friday Club') who Milner runs into and takes a positive interest in. Spencer - who is a poorly-masked and almost comically bad parody of Captain Archibald Ramsay MP and his 'Right Club' - is typically a believer in the predictive validity of the Protocols of Zion and says such absurd things to Milner (who he gives a copy to) as suggesting that they 'trace the jewish conspiracy back to the time of the Solomon' (which they don't and have never been argued to do).

Among other things Spencer is made out in 'The White Feather' to be a con-man and a cynic, while his wealthy followers are simply presented as being reactionary unintelligent buffoons and his few working class converts (which is historically the inverse of the pro-German right in Britain btw) are presented as behaving insincerely in their profession of 'fascist' beliefs or just being plain gullible.

Foyle naturally is made to see through Spencer's façade and is (predictably) called in to investigate a fairly random murder at one of Spencer's supporter's businesses (a hotel named 'The White Feather') and during the course of his investigation convinces Milner of the irrational nature of anti-jewish feelings (which Milner had begun to espouse). This is then intended to convey to the viewer a completely counter-factual version of history as it suggests that anti-jewish feeling was common only among the 'reactionary aristocracy' when it is well-known that it was among soldiers and city dwellers that such ideas were most commonly found while the aristocracy and upper class were often vocally opposed to anti-Semitism.

In contrast when Foyle's son Andrew is discovered to have been a member of the British Communist Party in 1938 while at university in the fourth episode of the first season ('Eagle Day'): Foyle takes it as being just a normal political viewpoint that - while he personally disagrees with it - is quite rational and irrationally persecuted by the British establishment.

This propagation of the idea that communism is a normal and quite respectable political ideology, while anything anti-jewish is absurd nonsense is next found in the third episode of the second season ('War Games'). In which we find a business magnate Sir Reginald Walker doing business with the SS via his son Simon who - as we soon find out - is extremely anti-jewish and pro-German. Simon is portrayed as being an out and out immoral fanatic willing to do whatever is necessary to remove obstacles from the achieving of his objectives, which we are told from his own lips 'is what he learned in Germany'.

The interesting counterpoint to the Walker family is Stephen Beck who - as we learn late in the episode - is a communist refuge and is being sent back to Germany by SOE to get in contact with the underground socialist and communist resistance movement in which he has contacts.

Beck (who is Foyle's friend and sometime fishing companion) is investigating the Walker family as a 'businessman trading with the Nazis' and he is also aware of Simon Walker's anti-jewish attitudes. This is because Beck's son is the one who denounced him to the Gestapo because he had met Simon Walker and found in him someone to be emulated who was even more radically anti-jewish and pro-German than he was. Beck's wife died shortly after they fled Germany to avoid arrest and is the wedge through which Beck is portrayed as a good and rational man who fled political persecution of his ideas for no good reason.

Naturally enough Foyle uncovers Simon Walker's anti-jewish and pro-German beliefs which he disdains and then knowingly causes Sir Reginald Walker to commit suicide after telling him that his son will hang. This portrayal once again demonstrates to us the overly positive way that Horowitz is portraying the jews and communists when compared to 'fascists' who had the courage of their convictions (even if their convictions are portrayed so badly that it is almost at times reminiscent of Monty Python's famous Hitler sketch).

This is continued in the portrayal of communist agitators in the fourth episode of series three ('A War of Nerves'): where Foyle is posted to watch and generally monitor the activities of a communist agitator and his actress girlfriend who have travelled down to Hastings to politicise and agitate those people working in the factories of the town. Foyle expresses his great distaste for doing this as it contravenes 'political freedom' and 'freedom of expression', but yet Foyle never distances himself from his suppression of anti-jewish and/or pro-German sentiments. Instead he views communism once again as a rational and dare I say normal political philosophy, while viewing anything anti-jewish or pro-German as being irrational and absurd as well as worthy of being actively persecuted and suppressed by his willing hands.

This is in spite of Foyle's prior knowledge of (or educated guess concerning) Stalin's crimes against humanity in the Soviet Union as revealed in the first episode of series seven ('The Russian House'). With this we can see that Foyle (and thus Horowitz) has a double standard in that he tacitly approves of communism, but yet takes an extremely hostile view of anything associated with European nationalism or anti-jewish sentiment.

This is further demonstrated in the second episode of series seven ('Killing Time'), which has as part of the sub-plot the issue of racial segregation as the local United States Air Force and Army commanders want to enforce it in the British seaside town of Hastings and miscegenation with native British girls having sexual relations with negro soldiers. Foyle's comment on the subject is very telling in that he rhetorically argues against it by asserting 'isn't that what we are fighting?'

In other words Foyle is an egalitarian and believes that miscegenation is not a problem or even a bad thing, but rather is a positive thing because of the inherently specious argument that 'we are all human' (we are also all mammals). At the end of the episode, we find British intolerance for mixed race unions - as well as issue from them - causing the couple concerned to leave for New York where they will be tolerated more. This is of course a further attempt by Horowitz to demonize any objection to racial mixing and current egalitarian orthodoxy: both positions common to those with even a slither of communistic belief.

This promotion of communistic belief in 'one human race' and that communism is a 'political creed like any other' stands in stark contrast to Horowitz's continual promotion of the special nature of jewish suffering. This is aptly shown in the second episode of season six ('Broken Souls') where Josef Novak - a jewish psychiatrist originally from Poland and now working for the Allies - murders a German prisoner of war named Johann for no other reason than that Johann was a German.

Novak's crime is presented as a kind of unfortunate side-effect of the 'Holocaust' in that now jews are killing Germans in response to the Germans having killed jews. Foyle's attitude towards Novak is that of understanding as to why he killed Johann and he doesn't judge him for doing so unlike just about on every other occasion of a murder in the series, because we are implicitly informed that Novak's crime was 'justified' and had not Johann shouted at Novak disdainfully in German when Novak knocked him over by mistake: then the crime wouldn't have happened.

Essentially Horowitz is telling us that jews killing Germans is quite all right, because they were/are 'traumatized' by the 'Holocaust' and the German people 'countenanced' the killing of jews: thus jewish vengeance is permissible and even laudatory according to Horowitz's view of the world as propounded by 'Foyle's War'. This is why even in episodes when there should be no references to 'Holocaust': we find a sub-plot dealing with it. One such is the second episode of season eight ('The Cage') where a murdered doctor's live-in fiancée/wife is discovered to be a 'Holocaust Survivor' who Foyle suggests needs to be treated with special care when she is being interrogated because all 'her family were killed by the Nazis'.

Thus, we can see how the choice of plot lines in Horowitz's 'Foyle's War' promotes leftist and anti-nationalist beliefs among Europeans, while also promoting the idea that jewish suffering in the Second World War was in some way 'unique' and that as such the world 'owes' the jews. Therefore we can conclude that the fact that Horowitz is a jew and that 'Foyle's War' has an inordinate and counter-factual focus on the 'suffering' of the jews is not likely to be a coincidence.